The 100 Best Novels in English

by Robert McCrum

Everybody loves a list, but this is something even more special. It is a collection by The Observer’s Associate Editor, Robert McCrum of those books that he considers to be the 100 Best Novels in English - with a short commentary on each. He gives the context for each work, an outline resume of the subject matter and provides fascinating anecdotes on how these books came to be published. It is immensely readable in book form, even more so than the original series which omitted much of the text due to space reasons. Indeed, to read this volume from beginning to end is to travel through 300 years of literature in just 256 pages, finding out as you go what it was that led to the evolution of this art form. McCrum is thoroughly expert in these matters but fundamentally a writer who entertains with his insights. The selection of novels is chronological rather than ranked.

Robert McCrum is a writer and editor whose most recent book, Globish, was published worldwide to international acclaim in 2010. From 1980 to 1996, he was editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, where he published, amongst others, Kazuo Ishiguro, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, Lorrie Moore, Adam Phillips and Hanif Kureishi. At the same time, he wrote seven novels, and co-authored the BBC TV series, The Story Of English, for which he was awarded an Emmy in 1986.

He was appointed literary editor of the Observer in 1996, and published P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in 2004. His account of his stroke, My Year Off (1998), is now in its third edition as a Picador Classic.